Nokia’s Roller Coaster Fortnight

Software Bug

After a few days of Lumia 900 being in the hands of users, Nokia announced that they had identified a memory management issue which results in the phone dropping LTE connection. They said they had identified the issue, and found a fix. That’s great, but my concern is, for such an important device, how could Nokia have missed the issue in their testing? Has the phone been rushed out? What else may be a problem that has not been uncovered yet?

Anyway, to their credit, Nokia came out and said that they will offer a free exchange of the phone for those who had already bought it. They also provided a $100 credit on the AT&T statements for everyone who bought the phone by April 21. Finally, in a stunning move (at least as it relates to Windows Phone updates by AT&T), Nokia said that the update will roll out to the phones around April 16th. The issue by itself is annoying, but the reaction by Nokia and the fact that they worked with AT&T to make this update roll out so soon, shows they do care about their customers. On Twitter, I saw several reactions similar to “I am going to be a Nokia customer for life”. It is really refreshing to see this happening to a brand that was virtually non existent in the US.

What’s more, Nokia exceeded all expectations and the fix rolled out three days early on April 13th! It is incredible how well they have handled this issue. It was of course imperative that they did, but to actually see it happen, gives customers a great deal of confidence in the brand.

NFC … in Lumia 610?

Finally, in another surprising move, Nokia announced that they have included Near Field Communication (NFC) capability in their “low end” phone, the Lumia 610. This phone, also referred to as their first “256MB phone” to denote the lower memory included in the phone, is going to be the lowest-priced Lumia device, targeted at emerging markets. What seems a bit strange, is that the NFC capability is not available on any other Windows Phone, Nokia or otherwise, and it was widely rumored to be something that would only arrive on the platform with the next big OS release, Apollo (Windows Phone 8). Not only is it coming before Windows Phone 8, but it is also coming in their budget device. Color me confused.

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Romit Mehta

Romit writes about mobile news and gadgets, and is currently a Windows Phone owner (Nokia Lumia 920).Find him on twitter @TheRomit. Personal site is http://romitmehta.com. View all posts by Romit Mehta